00168890209597867ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity by David Durst

The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory
ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20
Ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity
David C. Durst
To cite this article: David C. Durst (2002) Ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity, The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 77:3, 171-194, DOI: 10.1080/00168890209597867
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890209597867
Published online: 30 Mar 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 107
View related articles
Citing articles: 1 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vger20
Download by: [RMIT University Library] Date: 10 March 2016, At: 03:34
THE GERMANIC REVIEW
Ernst Bloch’s Theory of

Nonsimultaneity
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 03:34 10 March 2016
DAVID C . DURST
A t least since the pllb~icationof Postmodernism, 01; the Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism in 1991, Fredric Jameson has been recognized as the fore-
most Marxist theoretician of postmodemism. But what seems to have gone less
noticed is that in Postmodemism Jameson also programmatically outlines a the-
ory of modernism. In a section of the concluding chapter entitled “Notes towards
a Theory of the Modern,” Jameson characterizes modernism as the structure of
feeling corresponding to what Ernst Bloch called the “simultaneity of the nonsi-
multaneous” (Gleichzer’tigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen), a historical situation
marked by an often confused constellation of coexisting economic structures and
sociocultural formations from different epochs.’ That Jameson raises Ernst
Bloch’s dialectic of nonsimultaneity to the fundamental matrix of (high) mod-
ernism may seem surprising. Was it not Jameson who was noted for his defense
of Lukacs’s notion of the all-embracing totality of capitalism against critics such
as Bloch? The seeming paradox resolves itself when we consider that Lukacs’s
notion of the totality of commodity relations was more valid in the post-World
War I1 West than it ever was in the early 1920s when Histov and Class Con-
,scinusness was first published?-at least until 1989. Since the fall of the Berlin
Wall, postmodern Western Europe has confronted anew the stark realities of non-
simultaneity in former communist countries undergoing the painful process of
transition. I t may not be simply accidental, then, that in this renewed phase of un-
even capitalist moderniz,;ition-that is. in LI period witnessing the return of the
capitalist “modern” in parts of Europe-a number of important earlier works by
Ernst Bloch have finally been translated into English.7 Among Bloch’s writings
published in translation over the past decade are not only his first major work,
The Spirit of Utopia (2000), but also Litercly Essays (1998) and Heritage of Our
Times (1991), texts that all contain elements contributing to his conception of the
Ungleichzeitigkeit of modern European societies.
Yet despite discussions concentrating on Heritage of Our Times, to my knowl-
edge there are to date few analyses dedicated to the genesis of Bloch’s under-
standing of nonsimultaneity.4 In the following, I will attempt to trace the devel-
171
I72 DlJRST
opment of Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity across the Weimar period;’ in doing

so, I will try to show how it functions as an underlying matrix in his historical
understanding of modernity in art, politics, and philosophy. First, I will focus on
Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, where the idea of nonsimultaneity is not only linked to
a critique of orthodox Marxism’s economistic model of historical development,
but also, as we will see, plays an important role in explaining the preconditions
for the utopian surplus of modern art. Second, I will show how already in his
writings on politics between 1917 and 1919 Bloch employs the notion of nonsi-
multaneity to explain how responsibility for the outbreak of World War I cannot
be ascribed solely to the imperialistic strivings of capitalism but must also be
sought in the nonsimultaneous cultural formations and anachronistic social ideals
specific to the Central Powers, such as Prussian militarism and Austrian clerical-
ism. Third, I wilt take up a discussion of Bloch’s I924 review of Lukacs’s His-
tory and Class Consciousness, entitled “Aktualitat und Utopie,” in which Bloch
uses his philosophical understanding of the concrete nonsimultaneous contradic-
tions of modem society for a critique of Lukacs’s conception of the all-encom-
passing totality of capitalism. Fourth, I will show that it was not until Heritage
of Our Times (1934) that Bloch would ground his own theoretical approach sys-
tematically in a more open, multilayered, materialist dialectics of nonsimultane-
ity. Fifth, I will then analyze how Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity informs both
his conception of fascism in Germany and his defense of genuine expressionism
and surrealist montage against realist critics, such as Lukics. Last, I will trace the
unpropitious fate of Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity in the second half of the
1930s. On the one hand, Bloch’s understanding of German fascism was not only
heavily criticized by representatives of the official party line in Moscow, such as
Hans Gunther; it was also overshadowed by the Frankfurt School’s own theory
of fascism. On the other hand, the outcome of the Expressionismusdebatre was
dictated less by theoretical argument than historical circumstance; namely, that
the strength of the party line in Moscow generally supported the realists and the
collapse of the avant-garde movement in the face of the harsh political realities
of the late 1930s.
NONSIMULTANEITY AND THE UTOPIAN SURPLUS OF ART

The expressionistic movement in Germany represented a strong countercul-
tural trend between circa 1905 and the early 1920s; in painting, poetry, theater,
and music, it signaled the intense desire to break with the anachronistic cultural
conventions of the Wilhelmine period. In The Conflict in Modern Culture (191 8),
Georg Simmel undertook a characterization of expressionism. A perspicuous ob-
server of German culture, Simmel defined expressionism as an artistic movement
aspiring to the ideal of immediate expression of a subject’s inner emotions; ex-
pressionists strive to free themselves from the constraints of traditional artistic
conventions, such as naturalism’s dependency on the representation of external
reality, and insist on the passion of individual experience as the ultimate source
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY I73
of artistic creativity.6 Reflecting the increasing alienation of artists over against

bourgeois society, expressionists sought to raise the coincideizria oppositorum of
the times to a dynamic motor of truth and principle of aesthetic formation. On
the one hand, then, art was to become a vehicle for expression of the angst-rid-
den individual’s struggle against an increasingly cold and inhuman world; the
fragments collected in poetry and prose, montage-like images in painting and
later film, and dissonance in music all secrete the individual’s intense inner strife
and longing for autonomy in what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modern
life. And on the other hand, although many of the most noteworthy expression-
ists, such as Schoenberg, Kafka, or Kokoschka, shared a profound distrust of the
affirmative moment of harmony or reconciliation found in traditional forms of
bourgeois art, others such as Kurt Heynicke or Ludwig Rubiner made expres-
sionism into a gospel of salvation that pleaded for a new humanity of peace, love,
and friendship.
Although written during World War I, The Spirit of Utopia was not published
until the end of 1918 and appeared in a second, revised version in 1923. Bloch
himself would later state of his first major philosophical work that it embodied
the expressionistic impulse and the “contemplative” predilection prevalent at the
time (HT239). It is not only the title of Bloch’s book that reflects the “hope in
humanity and the belief in utopia,” which for Kurt Pinthus was so characteristic
of German expressionism.’ In revolt against the self-effacing style of traditional
academic writing, Bloch’s prose is anti-mandarin through and through. The Spir-
it of Uropiu is written in a passionate, highly metaphorical style, whose tempo,
Adorno once noted, reflects a completely altered approach to philosophical in-
quiry.’ The tremors of World War I that shook the self-understanding of the sub-
ject also ring clear in Hloch’s writing; it is as if it wants to express the struggle
of youth to flee from a world grown old to a utopian realm of unforeseen possi-
bilities of uninhibited human expression. And the themes of The Spirit of Utopia,
such as the priority of self-encounter over system, or dreams of the utopian “not
yet” over scientific knowledge of facts, are no less typical of the expressionistic
trend.
But The Spirit of Uropia does not just reflect one of the most salient examples
of the impact expressionism had on philosophy at the time; it may also be read
generally as a politically motivated philosophical defense of expressionism in art
and its utopian strivings. Indeed, a fundamental objective of Bloch’s book is to
show just how the utopian energy of art (and religion) is indispensable for the so-
cialist cause. According to Bloch, revolutionary socialists have for too long ig-
nored the utopian surplus of modern art and culture, a blind spot he says is a re-
sult of the one-sided economism of historical materialism. In prioritizing the role
of the dialectic of the forces and relations of production in historical develop-
ment, Marxism has become a theory that tries to “deduce the spiritual from the
economic” (SU 243). This economic reductionism has a twofold consequence:
On the one hand, it inhibits a proper appreciation of the central role sociopoliti-
cal superstructures play in sustaining relations of subordination. Here, even Marx
174 DURST
is not above reproach. By focusing the revolutionary thrust “only against capi-
talism-a relatively recent, derivative kmd of decadence-and not also against
the ceaseless, primordial locus of enslavement, brutality and exploitation: against
militarism, feudalism,” Bloch writes, Marx “reduced, misdirected and trivial-
ized” the age-old socialist movement (SU 244). And, on the other hand, by re-
ducing history to a dynamic of economic relations beyond the grasp of individ-
ual volition, orthodox Marxism deadens the revolutionary spirit of the oppressed
and underestimates the revolutionary potential of what Hegel called the absolute
spirit, namely art, philosophy, and religion. Marxism’s general mistrust in the
power of ideas thus serves to attenuate its own revolutionary energy, because
without the fire of utopian ideas sparking human action it remains a theory inca-
pable of praxis, something like a Kantian “critique of pure reason, for which a
corresponding critique of practical reason has not yet been written” (SU244).
In contrast to orthodox Marxist and other sociological models of economic de-
terminism, Bloch insists on the “socially unsublatable problematic of the soul”
(SU 246). That the utopian strivings of the human spirit are more than just an
epiphenomena1 reflection of socioeconomic tendencies is a fundamental convic-
tion of Bloch’s utopian philosophy; as we will see, it consistently informs the
moves he makes on the philosophical playing field, from his preference for
Kant’s inwardness and subjectivity over Hegel’s system, to his defense of the dis-
crete, different, and discontinuous against the Lukicsean conception of an all-
embracing totality. But the grounds Bloch offers to validate his position are
evolving; indeed, it is not until the late 1920s and 1930s that he is capable of ar-
ticulating in more systematic terms his own materialistic justification of the
utopian surplus of culture. In The Spirit of Utopia, Bloch’s arguments remain for
the better part sporadic and inchoate.
Despite these limitations, in his chapter on “The Philosophy of Music” Bloch
sets the notion of Ungfeichzeitigkeit to work in an attempt to explain the irre-
ducible utopian dimension of art. Echoing Nietzsche, Bloch argues that the true
artist is unzeitgemass, or out of season, for his individual genius is clearly “some-
thing different from what circulates among people, what unites people in mere
contemporaneity” (SU 40). This is especially true for music, which-in quota-
tion of Nietzsche-“rings like the language of a vanished age into an astonished,
modern world, and comes too late” (SU 40). Music’s “deep historical non-
simultaneities,” however, cannot be grasped simply and solely by recourse to SO-
cioeconomic determinants, such as those proffered by sociology. Although
Bach’s music, for instance, can be comprehended “on some lower level” in terms
of seventeenth-century Germany’s delayed development over against the West,
all this “explaining” from the outside remains ultimately superficial, and does not
make Bach’s total manifestation, his profound historical isolation, his sociological-
ly uninvolvable level of existence comprehensible. [. . .] [Bach’s] music, so very
young, a persistent syncope even in modern history, quite clearly obeys another
rhythm than that of its correspondingly morphologically, sociologically given cul-
tural whole. (SU 40f.)
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANElTY 175
Here, it is as if Bloch rejects all pretense to a scientific explanation of artistic ge-

nius; the nonsimultaneity characterizing a composer’s relation to the present can-
not be sociologically, economically, or even historically fixed and, in conse-
quence, seems to be as mysterious and indescribable as the j e ne sais quoi of art
itself
however beneficial an economic perspective might be in all other cases, or any such
perspective, whoever would totalize it in respect of music, errs. [. . .] Whoever dis-
agrees, and would like to harness the greatest variety to the same historical-socio-
logical pace, in order to be able to drive a larger team, and to harness non-simulta-
neous, indeed spherically incomparable elements within one epochal unity, will
become more superficial. (SU4 1f.)
Sociological or other such explanations of music or art in general would only

be possible if the homogenization of being and consciousness-or in more
Marxist terms, a simultaneity of economic base and political and cultural su-
perstructure-were given historically. But where such a synchronization of
spheres is not present, that is, “where it is impossible to close ranks with the
state and homogenize other values such as art, religion, science and philosophy
as its fairest flowers, what is essentially intended remains different, articulated
as a surplus, living only so to speak before its u priori audience” (SU 42). In
other words, music must be “illuminated from the direction of the future: as
Spirit in utopian degree.’’
This utopian surplus of nonsimultaneity can be seen in the dialectic of old and
new that govems seminal works of modern art. If the great composers of the
modem period (Neuzeit) offer evidence of something that reaches beyond mere
contemporaneity, then this is not because their music simply breaks with the past.
Theirs is instead a music that paradoxically “becomes younger precisely by be-
coming older [. . .] and [by] attaining the new-old quality of what is concealed in
this repose” (SU 44). By contrast, artworks that are oblivious to the past can
bring about nothing but a “senseless, empty, formalistic advance,” for what is
truly “new,” Bloch adds, “is exactly what is most reckless, painful, what lets it-
self go, what is most paradoxical to itself, which also stands closest to what is
old, most primordially basic, simplest, given, immemorially longed-for, lost to
the adult world” (SU 44). It is precisely this dialectic of continuity and rupture,
old and new, or the “Before in the Now” that Bloch is referring to when he as-
serts that a utopian force is present in the Bluue Reiter’s expressionistic exten-
sion of the Mumau tradition of glass-pictures and other folklorist motifs.’
NONSIMULTANEITY IN GERMANY, O R THE BELAATEDNATION

The nonsimultaneity central lo Bloch‘s understanding of the historica! precon-
ditions for expressive art is not, however, without its darker side. The fruits of
nonsynchronicity in Germany are found not just in the utopian energy rising from
the expressionistic images of the Bluue Reiter rooted in Upper Bavarian folklore
176 DURST
but also in the will-to-power seething from Prussian Wirtschafsmilitarismus,or

economic militarism. Reaching back to the first years of the Great War, Bloch re-
jected arguments blaming the war solely on imperialist capitalism. In contrast to
the orthodox Marxist position later articulated by “Zimmerwald Leftists” gath-
ered around Lenin, Bloch writes in “Der undiskutierbare Krieg” (“The Indis-
cussable War,” 191411915) that “those who support the extra-economic [. . .]
causes are relatively in the right to the extent that this indiscussable war does not
even show the absolutely necessary minimum of capitalist entrepreneurial ratio-
nale; here, the profit is itself ideology for the pre-capitalist and supra-capitalist
spirit of a universally oppressive Prussian state” (DW 12). This, of course, in no
way blinds Bloch to the undeniably strong economic interests involved in the
hegemonic strivings of imperial Germany. On the contrary, without the growing

international economic competition of heavy industry and vested interests of the
Junker class, Prussian militarism would not have been able to exert such decisive
influence over the rest of Germany (DW 13). What Bloch found instead so strik-
ing was just how Prussian military autocracy and German capitalism formed a
pernicious unity of old and new in an authoritarian brand of organized or state-
run capitalism (KnK 507).
If in “The Indiscussable War” Bloch takes note of the destructive dialectic of
old and new at work in his native land, his political writings between 1917 and
1919 raise the problematic of nonsimultaneity to a fundamental matrix of his
penetrating analysis of the fate of modem Germany. In Vademecumfur heutige
Demokraten (Vademecum f o r Contemporary Democrats, 1918), Bloch restates
his disappointment with existing Marxist explanations of the war. The formation
of strong state-capitalist economies in the warring countries, as found especially
in Germany, leaves the traditional Marxist “notion of commodity and market”
and with it “all the laws of commodity production” in need of serious revision.
And what is more, the current economic changes are no longer sufficient to ex-
plain the transformation simultaneously taking place in the ideological super-
structure. Particularly in Germany, as Bloch would repeatedly stress, authoritar-
ian and militaristic ideals played a crucial role in determining the course of the
war: “the actual motor for the war [. . .] remains the authoritarian state itself, the
functionalization, depersonalization, total organization, the self-serving life of a
despotic state apparatus that knows no humanity” (KnK 5 11).
When seen in this light, World War I can no longer be properly grasped as the
result of the expansionist drive of imperialism or, in more general terms, as the
catastrophic consequence of modem technological development, which reduces
the individual to an object manipulable by overwhelming historical forces. Fol-
lowing the “brilliant investigations” of his onetime teacher Max Weber, Bloch
maintains instead that the “economic situation subsequently conditions, but does
not generate the Spiritual, which rises again and again above the economic with
a trend-setting leap; neither the individual person, nor ethical life, nor myth are
to be eliminated as dynamic forces of history” (KnK 515). By underestimating
the autonomous role of ideas and cultural ideals in the course of history, Marx-
ism’s “total economistic conception of history” is not merely “the most lifeless
materialism,” but, he now adds, only further reinforces its predilection to “pre-
liberal, reactionary methods of domination” (KnK 515). It thus comes as no sur-
prise that in revolutionary Russia the Marxist mistrust of ideas, such as freedom,
individuality, human rights, and mysticism, has given rise to a new form of au-
tocratic oppression. The “total socialist dictatorship” in Bolshevik Russia is the
unavoidable result of a revolutionary abolition of capitalism without simultane-
ous elimination of Russia’s age-old authoritarian state. Led by Lenin, whom
Bloch, at the time a cntic of Soviet policy at Brest Litovsk, caustically called the
Red Tsar, Russia was on its way to creating a form of state socialism void of
human rights and dignity.I0
But what is true for revolutionary Russia is no less true for war-tom Germany.
Anticipating later scholarship on “the belated nation,”” Bloch uncovers how the
war and with it the fate of the modem German state must be explained by re-
course to the nonsimultaneity of “das verspatete Deutschlad’ (KnK 433, 517).
In contrast to the Western Entente Powers, modem Germany (and its ally the
Austro-Hungarian or Dual Monarchy) has not embraced the liberal ideals of the
French Revolution. Germany is characterized by a “nonsimultaneous situation”
(ungleichzeitigen Zustund), in which modem capitalism was wedded to a “pre-
capitalist form of domination of Junker theocracy” (KnK 5 17). The grounds for
Germany’s particular political belatedness extend back to the Reformation. For
Luther, the revolutioniq defense of inward freedom against the oppression of
papal authority was achieved only by capitulation of outward freedom to the in-
controvertible will of the prince; here, the autonomy of the human spirit is com-
promised by blind obedience to the political powers that be (KnK 565). Failed
were the German Peasant Wars of the 1520s that Bloch identifies as the early pre-
lude to a German revolution.l*And as a result of the Thirty Years War, the more
free-spirited medieval city culture in Germany was dealt a serious blow. What
follows for Bloch is the ascending influence of the “Prussian mentality” over
Germany as a whole, with its “masochistically” servile peasants and burghers
and “sadistically” inhumane aristocrats. Long before capitalism held sway, the
German will to freedom succumbed to the Prussian “virus of servility,” a self-ef-
facing sense of duty, and aggressive militarism; here, in this “grave of freedom,”
the destiny of the modern German people was sealed (KnK 83).
Following Johann Wilhelm Muehlon (1878-1944), a former director at Krupp
turned pacifist and the author of the antiwar book Die Verheerung Europas (The
Destruction ofEurope, 1918), Bloch thus argued that the most fundamental prob-
lem facing modem Germany concerned the reactionary tendencies inhibiting true
democracy. A peaceful end to the war and subsequent successful integration of
Germany into the league of democratic states could not be expected so long as
the hegemony of Prussian militarism and its circles of power remained intact
(KnK 261f.). As a consequence, the question of war guilt was for Bloch far more
than simply one of financial reparations; it was above all a vital precondition for
the overall moral regeneration of the German people, something on which he be-
I78 DURST
lieved the eventual reconciliation of Germany with the rest of the world would
depend. Germany must, Bloch exclaimed, “become its own judge; only the
atonement, the elimination of the seeds of the crimes committed, of the blindness
rampant amongst the people can act as a motor for the ethical renewal of the peo-
ple and state” (KnK 520). Unfortunately, those words of warning went unheeded
in the Weimar period. As Alfred Rosenberg points out, in the decisive phase of
revolutionary upheaval following the end of the war, the heads of the Weimar Re-
public could neither critically confront the German military nor ultimately break
the power of the Prussian aristocracy; in its dependence on the military to restore
domestic order and in its failure to introduce needed land reform, the new polit-
ical leadership was capable neither of decisively undercutting the power base of
the reactionary forces in Germany, nor of winning over the working class and the
peasantry east of the Elbe to the cause of democracy. l 3
Bloch was convinced, however, that “if the Prussian mentality in this war re-
mains unbroken, then even the future socialist revolution cannot bring true free-
dom and democracy” (KnK 198). Drawing lessons from the fate of the Russian
Revolution, Bloch warned against a socialist revolution that sought to circumvent
the achievements of 1789. As a socialist, Bloch formulates a conviction later to
resurface in Natural Law and Human Digniiy:I4 “First, political liberty, the de-
mocratic minimum, must be brought to a close everywhere, and this especially in
the Central States; only then can social liberty, the economic-social democracy,
the democratic maximum, truly be and remain freedom” (KnK 502, 540). Ac-
cording to Bloch, political freedom can be secured only by overcoming dictator-
ship, regardless of color or revolutionary zeal. The naked will-to-power must be
replaced first by the democratic “rule of law.” Not lastly, this also helps to explain
Bloch’s pro-Westem or more specifically pro-Wilsonian stance during the war;
at the time, he was of the opinion that the American president Wilson was pro-
moting the political ideal of liberalism not only internationally in the war against
Germany’s military autocracy but also domestically in his struggle against the
vested interests of U.S. monopolies and trusts (KnK 501f.).
The democratization of Germany was not to be achieved, however, simply and
solely by ratification of a liberal constitution. For Bloch, a new democratic struc-
ture of feeling must also emerge to replace the Prussian mentality so prevalent in
belated Germany (KnK 111). If true German freedom, which he identifies with
the tradition of German idealist philosophy, suffered under Prussian militarism,
then Bloch is convinced that contemporary art can play an important role in over-
coming the debilitating “discrepancy between the authoritarian German state
structure and the humanistic German culture” (KnK 471f.). Echoing Schiller’s
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Bloch asserts that the path from the
brutish nature of belated, Prussified Germany to the human liberty of true so-
cialism, based on liberal political freedoms, leads through the realm of art and
culture; they share responsibility in the mission of surmounting the often pemi-
cious syncope of German history by fostering the ideals of a utopian Cleichzeit-
igkeit or simultaneity of maximal political and economic freedom. Yet in contrast
to Schiller’s classicist faith in the aesthetic simulacra of harmony and wholeness,

Bloch places his hope for the cultural renewal of Germany in the utopian images
of expressionism and the European avant-garde.
NONSIMULTANEII’Y IN PHILOSOPHY OR THE COMPLICATION

OF TOTALITY THROUGH NONSIMULTANEOUS SPHERES
Aside from his I92 1 monograph on Thomas Munzer, the second, revised ver-
sion of The Spirit of Utopia (1923) and a small collection of earlier essays enti-
tled Durch die Wiiste (Through the Desert; also 1923), Bloch published no major
philosophical work during the 1920s. And even Spuren (Truces), published in
1930, was but a loose collection of expressionistic fragments modeled on Walter

Benjamin’s One-way Street (1928). It was not until 1934, with publication of
Heritage of Our TimeJ, that Bloch reappeared in full force on the philosophical
scene. The grounds for Bloch’s reticence are certainly not to be found in failing
productivity; especially during the late 1920s, Bloch was very active as a writer
for the feuilleton section of prominent German newspapers, including the Frank-
furter Zeitung. Instead, we will have to look for the explanation in what re-
mained, at least for Bloch, the unresolved debate with his onetime friend Georg
Lukacs over the question of totality and the utopian philosopher’s struggle to find
the language capable of adequately expounding a systematic understanding of
the open, polyrhythmic character of modernity.
Bloch became acquainted with Lukhcs at Georg Simmel’s seminar in Berlin in
191 1. Later, in Heidelberg, they became close friends, united by their passion for
philosophy and common antiwar stance. According to Bloch’s own testimony,
his “symbiosis with Lukacs” was such that for approximately three to four years
in the mid-1910s “we functioned like communication lines. [. . .] It could happen
that I or he (Lukacs) began to speak or think where the other left off? But what
Bloch and Lukacs together once in jest called their artificially constructed
“wildlife preserve of differences” proved in the end to be less artificial than they
originally thought.“ Already by the end of World War I, BIoch and Lukacs went
down very different personal and philosophical paths, with Lukhcs becoming a
card-carrying renegade theorist within the Soviet system, while Bloch became an
independent, yet often undiscerning, loyalist to Soviet communism.17
In an article published in 1920 entitled “The Old Culture and the New Cul-
ture,” Lukacs argues that the contemporary crisis of modem culture is a result of
the irreconcilable contradiction between the bourgeois ideology of subjective
freedom and the contemporary order of capitalist production.I8 In the age of mo-
nopoly capitalism, the individual circulates as a commodity on the market of ex-
change, reduced to an object of economic exploitation, whose worth is measured
by the surplus value his specialized labor-power produces. Denied the chance to
fashion oneself in economic life, the individual cultivates the desire for freedom
and wholeness in extra-economic realms of subjective illusion, such as art, phi-
losophy, and religion. But because such subjective images only point to an ab-
I80 DURST
stract possibility of humanity, without real, scientific comprehension of the ob-

jective economic trends governing historical existence, they only serve to repro-
duce the oppressive social order their creators sought to escape. The crisis-ridden
character of modem culture is thus reflected in a series of antinomies that are all
expressions of the contradictory totality of bourgeois society, such as facts and
values, necessity and freedom, and aesthetic illusion and reality. These polar ex-
tremes are destined to remain dialectically irreconcilable as long as the funda-
mental antagonisms of capitalism are left unresolved.
In 1923, Lukfics’s History and Class Consciousness appeared in print, a col-
lection of essays that is generally considered to mark the birth of a new tradition
of Hegelian Marxism in the twentieth century. In the central essay “Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukacs reveals how the totality of
commodity relations leads to the creation of dichotomies whose fixed, reified
character confronts the consciousness of each individual as quasi-eternal laws of
nature; the task of historical materialism is thus to break capitalism’s spell over
human consciousness by showing how the seemingly eternal antinomies of bour-
geois society are but the historical consequence of universal capitalist expansion
and its fetishism of commodities. It was in this context that Lukacs criticized
Bloch’s utopian philosophy for its reproduction of just the kind of fixed bour-
geois antinomies that Marxist theory sought to dialectically dissolve.lYBloch’s
attempt to deepen the “merely economic outlook of historical materialism” by re-
course to the utopian not-yet-found, for instance, in religion and art, Lukfics ar-
gues, “bypasses the real depth of historical materialism. When he then conceives
of economics as a concern with objective things to which soul and inwardness
are to be opposed, he overlooks the fact that the real social revolution can only
mean the restructuring of the real and concrete life of man. He does not see that
what is known as economics is nothing but the system of forms objectively defin-
ing this real life.”2oAs in the case of Thomas Munzer, whom Bloch praised,
utopian thought is incapable of offering concrete proposals for the historical re-
alization of its own abstract ideals. Hence, when left unmediated by comprehen-
sion of capitalism’s contradictory development, as was allegedly the case with
Bloch, the utopian visions found in art,religion, philosophy, or mythology mere-
ly reproduce in imagination the seemingly irresolvable antinomies of bourgeois
society. In short, Bloch’s utopian philosophy was not a solution to but a symp-
tom of the crisis of modem culture.
Without a doubt, it would have been impossible for Bloch not to have felt the
damage done to his own position; Lukfics’s arguments delivered his utopian phi-
losophy a serious blow. Utopian ideals remain empty without scientific knowl-
edge of the means by which to make them real, that is, without the organization
capable of linking theory to practice. But it was not long before Bloch respond-
ed with a review of History and Class Consciousness, entitled “Actuality and
Utopia” (1924), which contained his own critical rejoinder to Lukfics. Bloch’s re-
view was not without a strong measure of praise: Not only did he commend the
fact that Lukfics had revealed the vital importance of Hegel’s dialectical thought
ERNST BLOCH‘S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 181
for Marx and defend Lukics’s Hegelian Marxism against likely critics in Com-
munist Russia (AU 601), but he also saw in Lukics’s belief in the realization of
the Subject-Object-Identity of history through the proletariat’s revolutionary ac-
tivity a metaphysical grasp of things “fully conforming” to his own vision of the
Self- and We-Encounter expounded in The Spirit o j Utopia (AU 620).
At the same time. however, Bloch was wary of what he termed “the homoge-
nizing tendency” in Lukics’s concept of totality. Bloch’s insight into the limits
of Lukics’s theoretical undertaking here can be explained not only by recourse
to his concrete historical understanding of the nonsimultaneous character of
modem art and politics; what is more, Bloch must have read Lukics’s Hegelian
critique of Kant in Histmy and Class Consciousness as the polar opposite of his
own Kantian critique of Hegel in The Spirit of Utopia. It is as if in the chapter

“Kant and Hegel, Or, Inwardness Overtaking the Encyclopedia” the Kantian
Bloch had already vicariously rehearsed his dispute with the Hegelian Lukics.
There, Bloch criticized Hegel for his “panlogical pathos of perfection” that de-
stroys the individual soul and reduces the open and experimental character of his-
tory to the calculable outcome of the Concept’s supraindividual unfolding. Par-
allel to Rosenzweig’s critique of Hegel in The Star rfRedemption (1921), Bloch
finds fault with Hegelian dialectics because it fails to acknowledge adequately
the “way, resistance, and individual difference” (Gang, Widerstoss, und indi-
viduelle Differen?) of existence (SU 182). By positing reason as the inner poten-
tial and telos of (human) nature, Hegel purges history of the irreducibly Irrational
or wholly Other in such a way that “nothing new” can appear: “everything
painful, unendurable and unjust about life, the constant necessity of its refutation,
the self-immolation of nature and the entire Hurculean passion of the idea, can
be developed as something safe, [. . .] whose proper exposition is either just writ-
ten on the blackboard, or else, in accordance with the eternally resolved, eternal-
ly completed logological silence of actual reality, is a mere ceremony” (SU 185).
The ebb and flow of human passions, the conflicts and conciliations of human
society are but spice to an otherwise monotonous life in Hegel’s bland system,
something akin to the secured life Lukics approvingly found in the personalities
of Goethe’s novel of education Wilhelni Meister.2’
Although he did not fail to acknowledge the limits of Kant’s moral formalism
over against the expansiveness of Hegel’s philosophical system, Bloch was con-
vinced that “Kant ultimately stands above Hegel as surely as psyche above pneu-
ma, Self above Pan, ethics above the Encyclopedia, and the moral nominalism of
the End above the still half cosmological realism of Hegel’s world-idea’’ (SU
187). Indeed, in terminology later to be employed against Lukics, Bloch argues
that “Kant triumphs in the end’ because “the concepts, the forms, the spheric or-
ders (sphurische Ordnungen) [. . .] are nothing final. [. . .] The spheric order is
perhaps constitutive, but at the same time it has its limit within this constitutive
function,” such as is the case with law, art, and religion (SU 186). In Kant’s in-
wardness and openness Bloch found a utopian impulse of subjective freedom that
had been abandoned by Hegel. The latter’s closed system of philosophy thus ap-
182 DURST
pears as something akin to an “advocate of Being,” for it involves a “dialectical

kind of anamnesis” that seeks to “restitute some already past and precisely
known cultural alpha” (SU186f.). And the political consequence of Hegel’s apol-
ogy of the present was his devil’s pact with the Prussian state, whose historical
implications Bloch saw with such clarity in his political writings on contempo-
rary Germany. In the end, Bloch sought in his own dialectical gesture to unite the
two by proposing that “Kant must bum through Hegel”; that is, that the irre-
ducibly subjective and spiritual in Kant should be united with the cosmically
total in Hegel so that “the soul could overtake and outshine the expansive world,
but then did not remain narrow and merely a subjective idealism” (SU 187).
In The Spirit of Utopia, the concept of spheres or spheric orders remains with-
out a doubt vague; and it is perhaps no accident that in the second, revised edi-
tion of the book published in 1923 Bloch edited out much of what he had writ-
ten on the topic of spheres with reference to Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, in
Bloch’s 1924 review of History and Class Consciousness the concept of spheres
assumes central importance in his criticism of Lukics’s notion of totality. Just as
Bloch had found the “poverty of the Hegelian Spirit” rooted in its “scholastic re-
alism,” so too does he criticize the Hegelian Lukics for a “simplistic tendency to-
wards homogenization” that lacks a proper understanding of the “deep dimen-
sions of being” (AU 618). And just as Bloch wanted to let the openness of
Kantian subjectivity shine through Hegel’s closed system, so too will he argue
that Lukks’s notion of totality must be made more complex through the concept
of the sphere.
In his review, Bloch defines a “sphere” more precisely as the expression of dif-
ferent temporal and spatial subject-object levels of societal reality. History, he
states, is a “polyrhythmic formation,” whose differing spatial and temporal
spheres, especially those at the dianoetic level like art,religion, and metaphysics,
cannot be reduced to economic or “social matter” (AU 618). Thus, Lukics’s ten-
dency to homogenize reality by tracing appearances of the fragmented spheres of
bourgeois society back to the essential economic contradictions of contemporary
capitalism can neither adequately grasp “Life nor Nature,” nor especially “dia-
noetically related processes of communication” that are “almost always of ec-
centric content” (AU 618). Spiritual phenomena, such as religion, cannot find ful-
fillment in social reality, and political ideals, such as natural rights, appear on the
historical scene as “tasks, as problems or paradigms” yet to be realized. Further-
more, the “entire complex of physical nature” can in no way be said to have been
historically managed, for the social sublation of nature as its underlying reality
is not yet complete. In sum, all these eccentric contents of the historical process
demand their own space or in other words “the complication of totality through
the notion of the sphere,” in which the new and the not-yet conscious have still
to appear (AU 619f.).
Bloch’s disagreement with his erstwhile friend touched the core of LukBcs’s
philosophical project, but the former’s arguments remained abstract and incon-
clusive. The concept of spheres could not bear the weight of its critical inten-
tions; when compared with Lukhcs’s own elaborate theory of reification, Bloch’s
vague talk of spheres and the irreducibility of the hidden in history must have ap-
peared to Lukhcs as simply more of the same abstract utopian profusions that he
earlier rejected. It was not until the late 1920s and 1930s that Bloch was capable
of articulating a materialistically based dialectics of nonsimultaneity that would
function as a viable, alternative Marxist approach to the problems of modernity.
THE THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY OR

BLOCH’S DIALECTICS OF MODERNITY
On 15 February 1929, Bloch’s article “Many Chambers in the World-House”

appeared in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. In this short piece,
later republished with alterations in the second, extended version of Erbschajl
dieser Zeir (1962), Bloch takes a first step towards elaborating a materialistical-
ly based dialectical theory of the nonsimultaneous character of modem (German)
society. And although Lukhcs is not mentioned by name, the article may also be
read as a further development in Bloch’s critical exchange with the author of His-
tory and Class Consciousness.
Bloch’s colleague at the Frankfurter Zeitung Joseph Roth once wrote in
melancholy of the loss of nature in the Ruhrgebiet. In the endlessly extending in-
dustrialized zones where the end of one city marks the beginning of the next, it
was for Roth, this chronicler of loss par excellence, “as if there were no more
spatial destinations here: only temporal destinations like the certain, inexorable
and final death of the last patch of earth.”22Although Roth’s despondent impres-
sions must have been seen to support a Lukhcsean view of the all-encompassing
totality of commodity relations, Bloch insisted on the limits to this capitalist ex-
pansion in contemporary Europe. But in contrast to The Spirit of Utopia and “Ac-
tuality and Utopia,” Bloch now becomes more concrete in Marxist terms. He
aborts his vague discussion of dianoetic spheres; in exchange, he points to the
“incomparable simultaneity” (unvergleichliche-Zleic~) of the present that in-
volves phenomena standing “completely outside” of the dominant contemporary
Ratio of modem bourgeois society, incapable of being homogenized. What Bloch
is referring to here are first and foremost the social classes or groups whose so-
cioeconomic standpoint and cultural world view remain unincorporated in con-
temporary capitalism. Belonging to this “catalogue of the omitted” are not only
the prostitutes and pimps or criminal and destitute, who remain undefined or un-
derdefined in bourgeois terms, but also the peasantry and nobility:
even the peasants are not marching in rank and file, in their sobriety which is none,
in their property which is not capitalist and thus is not overturned. The nobility is
even less a thing of the past, overrun by the bourgeoisie in linear terms, but the Rine-
teenth century is still a scuffle between prevailing forces, not the least of wkich was
and remains the restoration. even within the bourgeoisie. (HT 35Jf.)
But it is not just man’s relation to man that is “U&nished” in modernity; it is also
184 DURST
the vast realm of nature that remains hidden to the cunning and exploitative ad-
ventures of modem capitalism. “The ‘natural barrier,”’ Bloch writes, “is by no
means surmounted as capitalism would wish. [. . .] The mere causal nexus, on
which our life, our encounters and destinies commencing from them depend,
does not look like a concrete production budget which surmounts the rank
growth of ‘nature”’ (HT 356). And even within the field of technology, it must be
admitted that the uncontrollable continues to erupt in the form of accidents, ex-
plosions, and collisions confronting man with the fragility of his rational hold on
life. In short, a “vast otherness” (ungeheuere Anderheit) in nature, technology,
and society continues to stand in stark juxtaposition to the “growing common de-
nominator” of capitalist modernization. In contemporary society, Bloch con-
cludes, “the mover of human destiny is unknown, even the mover of hunger and
the economy as well, all the more so the subject of ‘culture,’ of all the illusions
and also glittering images of a varyingly adequate consciousness in which the
genuine one is hidden” (HT 356f.). Man remains a world-Odysseus who is still
obscure to himself, a subject without a face, still Nobody to himself as his name
admits.
Bloch is thus convinced that the nonsimultaneous tendencies of contemporary
reality cannot be reconciled by a turn of the conceptual dial; on the contrary, they
“block an all too quickly or prearrangedly collecting concept” (HT 357). Faced
with the undeniably diverse character of concrete socioeconomic and cultural el-
ements of modernity, such an overly “homogenizing” understanding of the con-
cept is too abstract and illegitimately omits “what does not fit” into its bourgeois
frame of reference. The indirect reference to Lukics is unmistakable.
But Bloch’s breakthrough to his own alternative conception of the dialectical
enterprise did not come until later. In “Non-Simultaneity and Obligation to its
Dialectic,” the central theoretical chapter of Heritage of Our Times, written in
May 1932, Bloch offers his first systematic account of a multitemporal and mul-
tispatial dialectics of the nonsimultaneous and simultaneous contradictions col-
lected in his day. Bloch begins with the seemingly paradoxical claim that “not all
people exist in the same Now” ( H T 97). Rather than synchronized with the pre-
vailing economic and cultural set of circumstances of contemporary capitalism,
Germany contains a “particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material” that
has not yet been thoroughly formed by the “capitalist Ratio.” Numerous strata of
German society therefore carry with them an earlier element that contradicts the
“capitalist Now”; social groups, such as youth, and economically weakened stra-
ta, such as the peasantry and newly impoverished middle class, reflect a contra-
dictory situation in which “impulses and reserves from pre-capitalist times and
superstructures are at work, genuine non-simultaneities therefore, which a sink-
ing class revives or causes to be revived in its consciousness” (HT 106).
In light of this broken character of the present, a number of consequences fol-
low for a proper understanding of dialectics and history in the age of monopoly
capitalism. The appearance of functionally independent societal subsystems can
no longer be considered a mere epiphenomenon of the underlying laws of capi-
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 185
tal accumulation, and the crisis of modem culture can no longer be grasped in the
Lukhcsean fashion as an expression of the essential contradiction between the
ideology of individual freedom and state-organized c a p i t a l i ~ mSuch
. ~ ~ an overly
“idealistic” conception of the social totality does violence to the particular, non-
simultaneous zones of nature and human relations by reducing them to but sub-
altern moments in the “uninterrupted, panlogical connection” of modem capital-
ist development (HT 1 IS). And because it does not penetrate to the particulars in
their concrete historical character but imposes an abstract conception of totality
on them from the outside, the dialectical totality found in Lukhcs’s philosophy of
praxis paradoxically reveals itself in the end to be “contemplative”; it inhibits
rather than promotes true revolutionary action. Seen in this light, Bloch is capa-
ble here of subtly reversing the critique of contemplation that Lukhcs once lev-
eled against his utopian philosophy: The homogenizing conception of totality is
but an abstract possibility without the concrete knowledge of historically nonsi-
multaneous phenomena required for the effective organization of revolutionary
forces.
As an alternative to Lukhcs’s homogenizing dialectic of capitalist synchronic-
ity, Bloch proposes a “multi-temporal and multi-spatial dialectics” that more ac-
curately reflects the complex constellation of nonsimultaneous societal forces at
work in the contemporary world. Instead of a flat dialectical concept that passes
over the nonsimultaneous, Bloch’s conception of a “multi-voiced dialectics”
bears witness to the open and unfinished, the spatially and temporally “hetero-
geneous contradictions” of modem capitalism (HT 114ff.); it is a dialectics of the
concrete “‘contradictions’ collected today” that have not yet been “overtaken by
the course of economic development” ( H T 116). Against this backdrop, Bloch
maintains that his own conception of the “dialectical totality” is “critical, non-
contemplative, and practically intervening” (HT 115). Not only can an under-
standing of the heterogeneous contradictions of modernity function as a needed
remedy to the homogenizing tendencies in contemporary Marxism; moreover, by
remaining open to “the polyrhythmics and the counterpoint” of the present, his
materialist dialectic of the nonsimultaneous totality can unearth the “non-past,
because never wholly become, and hence lastingly subversive and utopian con-
tents in the relations of human beings to human being and to nature” that are use-
ful in the struggle against the reactionary forces of the present (HT 1 lSf.).
In more general theoretical terms, Bloch distinguishes between two major
types of dialectical contradiction, both of which assume a subjective and objec-
tive form. In modern European capitalist societies we find on the one hand “non-
simultaneous contradictions’’ existing between outdated societal strata and the
capitalist system itself. By virtue of its oppressive nature, a nonsimultaneous
contradiction manifests itself subjectively as an individual’s “suppressed, dull
rage capable of being distracted”; taken in objective terms, it represents the “un-
resolved past” (HT 108ff.).In opposition to nonsimultaneous contradictions,
there are also “simultaneous contradictions” at work in those sectors of society
that have for the most part overcome all precapitalist forms of production and
186 DURST
cultural structures of feeling. Subjectively, a simultaneous contradiction appears

on the historical scene as “real revolution” manifest in the “vigilant revolution-
ary action of the proletariat” and objectively in the “prevented future contained
in the Now” (HT 110ff.). And although Bloch is sure to point out that “the pro-
letarian voice of the simultaneous dialectic firmly remains the leading one” in
modem life, he nevertheless adds that “beneath and above this cunfusJinnus
there run disordered exuberances,” that is, the nebulae of nonsimultaneous con-
tradictions, whose revolutionary energy remains to be tapped (HT 116).
According to Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity, then, history must be read as
an open book, whose drama unfolds the unresolved contradictions of past, pres-
ent, and future in a more radically discontinuous, fragmented, and unpredictable
fashion. As Bloch’s colleague at the Frankfurter ZPitung Siegfried Kracauer once

put it, “there are no wholes in this world; rather, it consists of bits of chance
events whose flow substitutes for meaningful contin~ity.”~~ Incomplete as it is,
the ever-expanding commodification of residual zones of archaic or precapitalist
social relations remains fluid; societal development in the age of imperialism is
not yet fully under the sway of the laws of capital accumulation. Under these cir-
cumstances, objectively nonsimultaneous forces, including “older circumstances
and forms of production” as well as “older superstructures” may continue to play
an important social function.
In light of the nonsimultaneous character of modem society, Bloch writes,
contemporary history can no longer be equated with
an entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism, for instance, as the final
stage, has resolved all the previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial
entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved cor-
ners. Today not even the economic substructures in these corners, i.e. the obsolete
forms of production and exchange, have passed away, let alone their ideological su-
perstructures, let alone the genuine contents of not yet defined Irratio. (HT62)
This is especially true for modern Germany, which Bloch calls “the classical land
of non-simultaneity” (HT 106). Drawing on his earlier political writings, Bloch
explains that in contrast to England and France, Germany had managed no bour-
geois revolution up until 1918. In what he sees as a “gigantic, a seething con-
tainer of the past,” Bloch explains that Germany throws up
unsunnounced remnants of older economic being and consciousness. Ground rent,
large landed property and its power, were almost universally integrated into the cap-
itaiist economy and its political power in England, and differently in France; where-
as in I O R ~backward and even longer diverse Gemany the victory of the bourgeoisie
did not even develop to the same extent economically, let alone politically and ide-
ologicdby. Tbe “unequal rate of development” [. . .] thus prevented the clearly dom-
haskg infkreRce of capitalist thinking, and hence of simultaneity, in the economic
kienmky af forces. Witk Eaet Elbian feudalism a whole museum of German inter-
scLb.8 wos preserved at plry rate, an machrcmistic superstructure which however
bc8116epca))y sqema- aad in need of stlpport it may be, nevertheless prevails;
w d d lrisbory was ceEtainl.y not h a y s urban history in Germany. (HT106)
Bloch’s formulation of his own programmatic conception of a more open, multi-

voiced materialist dialectics of modem capitalism proved to be a crucial step in
the evolution of his thought; it contributed to the crystallization of his theory of
nonsimultaneity, with which he was able to provide not only a more incisive ac-
count of German fascism but also better defend avant-gardist art against realist
critics like LukAcs.
THE NONSIMULTANEITY OF FASCISM

Bloch was one of the first to warn against underestimating the Nazi threat. In
an article published in 1924, entitled “Hitler’s Violence,” Bloch took note of how
easily not just the “impoverished petit-bourgeoisie,” but also the “organized pro-
letariat” and “lumpenproletariat” could be won over to German fascism. At the
time, however, what struck Bloch most was how easily German youth were in-
toxicated by Hitler’s “powerfully suggestive nature” and “fanaticism of vision”
(VKW 344). According to Bloch, the grounds allowing for German youth to
change political allegiances, often from the radical left to the radical right, must
also be sought in the fact that both “here as there the capitalist-parliamentary
state is negated, here as there dictatorship is demanded, the form of obedience
and command, the virtue of decision instead of the cowardices of the bour-
geoisie, this eternally discussing class” (VKW 345). To work against Hitler’s
“revolutionary sect,” Bloch maintained, one must drive out the false conscious-
ness of the masses by strengthening the proletariat’s concrete strivings for revo-
lution and the humanization of life.
But Bloch was not just one of the first to take seriously the Nazi movement;
he stood alone among Marxists of the period in that he viewed fascism not so
much as the unavoidable superstructural expression of monopoly capitalism as
what Anson Rabinbach has called a “cultural synthesis” of nonsimultaneous ele-
ments in modem Germany.25In November 1930, at a time when the National So-
cialists were rapidly gaining ground, Bloch returned to the phenomenon of fas-
cism in his article “On the ‘Third Reich,”’ printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung and
later appearing with alterations under the title “Amusement Co., Horror, Third
Reich” in the first edition of Heritage of Our Emes (1934). The article can be
read as a critique of the German Communist Party’s strategy of struggle against
fascism, whose naive optimism in the course of history Bloch clearly sees as an
unconscious reflex of its overeconomistic habit of thought.26 Bloch censures
Marxist propaganda in Germany for its “premature hope” in the progressive rad-
icalization of the masses for the socialist cause, for it leads to complacency in the
fight against the Nazis over the rightful inheritance of revolutionary ideals.
Rather than writing off the archaic-emotional remnants of Nazi rituals and beliefs
as the mere “dark fanaticism” of backwardness and irrationality, Bloch claims
that one must acknowledge the “serious” character of the National Socialists’
“energy.” “The fanatical-religious strain which does not merely stem from de-
spair and stupidity, the strangely roused strength of faith,” he believes, “could in
I88 DURST
fact, like every recollection of ‘primitiveness,’ also have turned out differently, if
it have been [. . .] dialectically transformed, on the ‘enlightened’ side, instead of
merely being abstractly cordoned off’( H T 60f.). As an example Bloch refers to
the revolutionary origins of the myth of the Third Reich, which the Nazis had co-
opted for their reactionary cause. Rather than surrender such myths, laden with
legitimate utopian impulse, to the enemy without a fight, Marxists must finally
come up with an alternative ideology capable of inspiring the hearts and minds
of the masses, including the increasingly destitute middle class. Directing his
comments to the German Communist Party, Bloch asserted that an essential ob-
jective in the struggle against fascism must be “the winning of the impoverished
centre” and the activation of its “non-simultaneous contradictions to capitalism”
( H T 62). To this end, not only must there be an overhaul of the very language of
communism, whose “totally contemporaneous” character was focused only on
those proletarian elements of society caught up in the contradictions of the most
advanced economy (HT 105); what is more, as Anson Rabinbach aptly puts it,
the Left must activate its own “revolutionary fantasy” out of the “explosive tra-
dition of mystical and romantic anti-capitalism’’ composed not merely of “irra-
tional and archaic myths but [also] dynamic and active components of the pre-
sent.”*’ Otherwise, it will remain an accomplice of its own defeat.
IN DEFENSE OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Against this backdrop, we can perhaps better weigh the intense interest in what
since has been labeled the Expressionismusdebatte of the mid- 1930s, in which
Bloch and others defended the Erbe of avant-gardist art against Lukacs and his
realist followers. Equipped with his theory of nonsimultaneity, Bloch now re-
turns to a more direct exchange with Lukacs that ultimately revolved around the
differing conceptions of the “totality,” something that-as Lukhcs did not fail to
point out-went “right to the heart of the ideological issues at stake.”28
In reply to Bloch’s defense of expressionism, Lukacs asserts that modern cap-
italism has developed a “world market, thanks to which the economy of the
whole world becomes an objectively unified totality.”29By contrast, Bloch stress-
es that in the current phase of imperialist expansion one cannot assume that all
precapitalist, residual or archaic social relations have been overcome. Modem
capitalist relations of production therefore form but a limited, if ever more all-en-
compassing, part of a larger, more complex and discontinuous whole. Seen in
this light, LukAcs is incorrect or premature in describing modem society as an in-
tegrated totality.
Insight into the interrupted nature of contemporary capitalist reality also af-
fects Bloch’s understanding of modem art and culture. For if one accepts the rad-
ically ruptured character of modem society, then one cannot justifiably argue that
the “disruptive and interpolative techniques” of expressionism or the later “ex-
periments with montage” of surrealism are just “an emptyjeu d ’ e ~ p r i t . ’On
’ ~ the
~
contrary, what the realist LukAcs portrays as the purely subjective illusions of ex-
ERNST BLOCH‘S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY I89
pressionism and surrealism is by no means simply a symptom of the increasing-

ly obscure and uncontrollable forces of contemporary capitalism but also critical
expression of a society that is itself fundamentally ambiguous and interrupted.
“Genuine expressionism,” Bloch maintains, “did not only instill subjectivistic in-
tentions into a denied matter, but covered the world with war, mounted its frag-
ments into grotesque caricatures, mounted into hollow spaces above all excesses
and hopes of a substantial kind, archaic and utopian images” ( H T 204f.). In ad-
dition, the expressionists’ condemnation of the horrors of World War I and Pla-
doyer for peace and humanity were not just further examples of the naive, sub-
jective refractions of seemingly irresolvable antinomies in bourgeois society, as
LukBcs asserted; instead, they could also be taken as critical interventions ad-
dressing an overly Prussified Germany’s belligerent “militarism,” “unchristian

cult of power,” and inhumane contempt for the political “ideals of 1789,” all of
which remained for Bloch irreducible to the economic strivings of imperialist
capitalism (KnK 5 17ff.).
Thus taken, “genuine expressionism” can no longer be reduced to a docu-
ment of subjectivistic capitulation to an all-embracing capitalism. In light of
contemporary reality’s essentially open, intermittent nature, avant-garde art is
necessarily a “poetry of hollow space” that seeks to “display the collapse of
structure” and the “inability to achieve closure and tinality” ( L E 110). In oppo-
sition to the realist Lukhcs, Bloch sees in the expressionist and surrealist use of
montage the most progressive form of contemporary art. For just as “reality it-
self is interruption,” so too is montage: by the fact that it “takes its parts from
the surface chopped to pieces, but does not put them into new closed unities”
( H T 207), montage is capable, as no other artistic technique, of providing a crit-
ical “account of the chaos of reality as actually experienced, with all its
caesuras and dismantled structures of the past” ( H T 2 0 5 ) .In this way, Bloch can
turn (again) the critique of subjective formalism that Lukhcs leveled against ex-
pressionistic and avant-garde art on the arch-realist himself. For, as Bloch con-
cludes, the notion of “totality” that realists such as LukBcs “play out against the
revolutionary use of montage is nothing other than idealism, belief in an unin-
terrupted relation. And this relation, on this side of all intermittence, appears
only in thinking and in its undisturbed system, yes, only exists in the closed Pan
of myth, but never in real it^."^'
THE FATE OF A THEORY

The fate of theoretical debates is rarely, if ever, simply and solely an intellec-
tual affair, especially in times of crisis. Bloch was confident that in the wake of
its publication at least fifty books would soon appear on Erbschafi dieser Zeit.
History, however, was to have it otherwise. Aside from qualified praise from fig-
ures like Klaus Mann or Ludwig Marcuse, the private and public reception of
Heritage of Our Times and with it Bloch’s theory of fascism was marked by cri-
tique or neglect. Privately.. his friend Walter Benjamin wrote critically of Bloch’s
190 DURST
book in a letter of 6 February 1935 to Alfred C ~ h nAnd . ~ in

~ 1936, in Interna-
tionale Literatur, Hans Gunther toed the official Communist Party line by claim-
ing to reveal the “inner contradictions” of Bloch’s Heritage book that would
bring the unorthodox thinker and others like him back into the fold.33With a
LukAcsean lecture on the all-encompassing totality of commodity relations in
contemporary capitalism, Gunther rejects Bloch’s dialectics of nonsimultaneity,
theory of fascism, and positive appraisal of avant-gardist montage. For Gunther,
little if anything is to be won from Bloch’s Erbversuche or attempts to claim a
revolutionary heritage from a bourgeois world in decline; for a true Marxist, what
can be culturally inherited from this reactionary world is but a “philosophy of im-
perialism” or the irrationality of “bourgeois montage.”34In his rejoinder “Be-
merkungen zur Erbschaft dieser Zeit” (1936), Bloch shows with justification
how Gunther fails to confront the truth of fascism. Like Heinrich Heine’s Rabbi
from Bacharach, who on arrival in a non-Jewish city exhorts his beautiful young
wife Sarah to shut her eyes to its colorful images, Gunther admonishes his read-
ers to ignore an uncomfortably kaleidoscopic reaIity.js Yet despite his powerful
self-defense, the damage to Heritage of Our Times had already been done. The
same could be said for Bloch’s position in the Expressionismusdebatte. In spite
of what seems to constitute arguments in favor of Bloch and many others who
supported a more differentiated approach to the cultural legacy of the bourgeois
world, the party line prevailed at a time when the historical avant-garde in the
West was in disarray; in this sense, Bloch sought in futility to back a movement
already to a great extent defunct.
Bloch’s exile from fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia was compounded at
the time, however, by a third factor:36the lacking reception of Erbschaft dieser
Zeit by the Frankfurt School. Of the dozens of works reviewed in the Institute for
Social Research’s Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung during the 1930s, Bloch’s is
conspicuously absent.37Apparently, the grounds for this were both political and
professional. Not only was Bloch’s support for the Moscow show trials in
1937/1938 a potential source of embarrassment for the Institute at its new loca-
tion in New York; what is more, in 1937, after finding Bloch’s unpublished man-
uscript on Das Materialismusproblem to contain a “certain irresponsibility of
philosophical improvisation,” Adorno recommended to Max Horkheimer, direc-
tor of the Institute for Social Research, against the official cooperation for which
Bloch had once hoped.3s
Perhaps more important, however, is that Bloch’s theory of fascism contra-
vened the Institute’s own analysis. Representative of its position at the time is
Herbert Marcuse’s article “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitiken
Staatsauffassung,” published in the 1934 issue of the Zeitschrift fur Sozial-
forschung. In the article, Marcuse argues that the fascist state is above all a con-
sequence of the historical transformation of liberal competitive capitalism to mo-
nopoly capitalism: “the total authoritarian state offers the organization and theory
of society which corresponds to the monopolistic stage of capitali~m.”’~ In Re-
actionary Modernism, Jeffrey Herf has pointed out how misdirected the Frank-
furt School was in its analyses of National Socialism, something especially true
for Marcuse, whose narrative saw liberalism and fascism as historically inter-
twined. What for Herf was missing in the Frankfurt School at the time was a
proper appraisal of the weakness of the enlightenment and its tradition of politi-
cal liberalism in Germany, not its destructive dialectic.40But what is true for the
Frankfurt School is not valid, or is less valid, for Bloch: not valid, on the one
hand, to the extent that 13loch’s political and philosophical writings around the
beginning of the Weimar Republic not only expose the supra-economic grounds
for Germany’s reactionary political tendencies but also express the conviction
that “political freedom is an irreplaceable stage on the path to economic free-
dom” (KnK 516); less valid, on the other hand, to the extent that Bloch’s grow-
ing sympathies for Soviet Communism beginning in the mid-1920s led him to
underplay the importance of political liberties in favor of the real andor alleged
economic liberties enjoyed in the Soviet Union, for him the sole bulwark against
fascism, only to return to this topos with renewed energy in his work on Natural
Law and Human Dignity that began in the late 1930s.
It is at any rate unfortunate that in his excellent study Herf does not take up an
in-depth analysis of Bloch’s (political) writings>’ which throughout the period
stressed the particularly reactionary political tradition of a nonsimultaneous,
overly “Prussified Germany.” In contrast to the Frankfurt School’s attempt to ex-
plain the fascist state as an organizational form corresponding to monopoly cap-
italism, Bloch sought to develop a theoretical approach capable of critically ex-
plaining the rise of fascism as a cultural synthesis that went beyond all economic
reductionism. In Heritage of Our Times, Bloch maintained a position almost pre-
cisely opposite to that of Marcuse; namely, that “capitalism had no other choice
than that which it has excellently made with fascism up till now; yet it would cer-
tainly prefer old liberalism to romantic ‘anti-capitalism’ (without which business
could admittedly no longer be done in Germany). The blood myth, and intoxica-
tion as a whole, is not the most desirable servant of capitalist reason” (HT 55).
Seen in this light, it is not surprising that the Frankfurt School at the time chose
not to undertake a systematic evaluation of Bloch’s writings. As fate would have
it, Bloch and his theory of nonsimultaneity remained out of season.
American University in Bulgaria
ABBREVIATIONS
References are to the following English and German editions of Bloch’s works:
AU “Aktualitiit und Utopie. Zu Lukhcs’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein,” ed.
Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Aufsutze zur objektiven Phantasie (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1969). (All translations are mine.)
DW Durch die Wuste. Friihe kritische Aufsurze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964).
(All translations are mine.)
HT Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge:
Polity, 1991).
192 DURST
KnK Kampf, nicht Krieg. Politische Schrijien 191 7-1919 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1985). (All translations are mine.)
LE Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
SU The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2OOo).
VKW Viele Kammem im Welthaus. Eine Auswahl aus dem Werk (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1994 ). (All translations are mine.)
NOTES
1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 01; The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
UP, 1991) 307.
2. In “Reflections on the Brecht-LukBcs Debate,” Jameson writes in a similar vein: “In
an unexpected dknouement, it may be Lukscs-wrong as he might have been in the

1930s-who has some provisional last word for us today” (Fredric Jameson, The Ideolo-
gies ofTheory: Essays 1971-1986, vol. 2 [Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 19881 146).
3. Already in the 1980s, a number of important works by Bloch appeared in English
translation, including Natural Rights and Human Dignity (1985). Essays on the Philoso-
phy of Music (1985), his magnum opus The Principle of Hope (1986), and The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature (1988). In “Reclaiming the ‘Terrain of Fantasy,”’ Jamie
Owen Daniel uses Bloch’s notion of nonsimultaneity for a critical interpretation of the rise
of a new form of reactionary nationalism in reunited Germany (Jamie Owen Daniel, “Re-
claiming the ‘Terrain of Fantasy,”’ Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen
Daniel and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997) 53-62.
4. The best analysis of Bloch’s notion of nonsimultaneity as it relates to his theory of
fascism remains Anson Rabinbach’s “Unclaimed Heritage: Emst Bloch’s Heritage of Our
Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 5-21. Other
important analyses of Bloch’s Heritage book and his theory of nonsimultaneity include:
Tony Phelan’s “Emst Bloch’s ‘Golden Twenties’: Erbschafl dieser Zeit and the Problem
of Cultural History,” Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic, ed. Kieth Bullivant
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977); Dick Howard’s “Emst Bloch - unsere Zeitgenosse,”
Emst Blochs Wirkung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1975) 435-60; and Martin Jay’s Marx-
ism and Totality: Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas (Berkeley: U Cali-
fornia P, 1984) 174-95. In German, Beat Dietschy, a former student of Bloch’s, has pro-
vided an excellent full-length study of the genealogy and place of the notion of
nonsimultaneity in Bloch’s historical understanding of modernity (Beat Dietschy, Ge-
brochene Gegenwart. Ernst Bloch, Ungleichzeitigketi und das Geschichtsbild der Mod-
erne [Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert, 19881); and Christina Ujma undertakes an in-depth look
at Bloch’s view of aesthetic modernism in light of his theory of nonsimultaneity (Christi-
na Ujma, Emst Blochs Konstruktion der Modeme aus Messianismus und Marxismus
IStuttgart: M&P, 19951). And in France, GCrard Raulet introduced Bloch’s notion of non-
simultaneity to the discussion on modemisdpostmodernism (GCrard Raulet, Gehemmte
Zukunft. Zur gegenwartigen Krise der Emanzipation [Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchter-
hand, 19861).
5. Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit has not found a unitary rendering in English,
something that unfortunately only makes more difficult a systematic study of Bloch’s the-
ory. In Heritage of Our Times, for instance, Ungleichzeitigkeit is translated as “noncon-
temporaneity,” whereas in The Spirit of Utopia as “nonsynchronism.” In the following
paper, I follow Jameson by rendering Ungleichzeitigkeit in most cases as “nonsimultane-
ity,” to my mind the most literal translation of the German term.
6. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971)
381f.
7. Kurt Pinthus, “Zuvor,” Menschheitsdanimerung. Ein Dokument des Expressionis-

mus, ed. Kurt Pinthus (Hamburg: Rowolt, 1955) 32.
8. Theodor W. Adorno. Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schrifen, vol. 1 I (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990) 561f.
9. For a discussion of the importance of this dialectic of rupture and continuity, see
Phelan’s “Bloch’s ‘Golden Twenties”’ 96.
10. In his otherwise excellent analysis of Bloch’s evolving thought, Martin Jay fails to
take into adequate account Bloch’s political writings between 1917 and 1919 when he
claims that “Bloch supporled the Soviet Union from 1917 to at least 1956” and “re-
main[ed] a convinced Leninist for most of his life” (Jay, Marxism and Totalify 193, 195).
11. See Helmut Plessner’s 1935 study, Die versputete Nation (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1974).
12. The central place the peasant revolts play in Bloch’s narrative of Germany’s tragic
history of aborted revolutions also helps to explain his intense interest in the theologian of
the peasant revolts Thomas Munzer, about whom Bloch published a study in 1921. See
here Ernst Bloch, Thomay Miinzer als Theologe der Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1976).
13. Arthur Rosenberg, Cc~chichteder Weimnrer Republik (Hamburg: Europaische Ver-
lagsanstalt, 199 I ) 34.
14. For a discussion of Bloch’s earlier work on Natural Law and Human Dignity
(1961), while in exile in the United States, see Vincent Geoghegan’s Ernst Bloch (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1996) 134.
15. Rainer Traub und Harald Wieser, eds., Gespriiche mit Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1975) 32.
16. Traub and Wieser, Gcsprache 32.
17. The most notorious evample of Bloch’s undiscerning loyalty is his support for the
Moscow show trials. For Bloch’s arguments, see “Kritik einer Prozesskritik (1937) and
“Bucharins Schlusswort” in Ernst Bloch, Vim Hazard zur Katastmphe. Politische Auf-
siitze aus den Jahren 1934-1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972) 195-205 and 351-58.
18. Georg Lukics, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” Marxism and Human Lih-
eration (New York: Dell, 1973) 3-19.
19. See Georg Lukics, Pcditical Writings, 1919-1929: The Question of Parliamentari-
anism and Other Essays (London: NLB, 1968) 15.
20. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 197 1) 192-94.
21. Georg Lukics, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971) 135.
22. Joseph Roth, “Triibsal einer Strassenbahn im Ruhrgebiet,” Panoptikum Gestalten
und Kulissen (Koln: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 1983) 19.
23. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukics states more precisely that under mod-
em capitalism “the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified eco-
nomic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified
laws” (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness 91-92. My italics).
24. Quoted in David Frishy, Fragmente der Moderne (Rheda-Wiedenbriick: Daedelus
Verlag, 1989) 263.
25. Anson Rabinbach is nght to assert that “Ernst Bloch stood practically alone amid
his Marxist contemporaries by taking seriously the power of fascism as a cultural synthe-
sis” (Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage” 5 ) .
26. See here Rabinbach’s “Unclaimed Heritage” 6.
27. Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage” 6.
28. Georg Lukacs, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics and Politics ed. Ronald Taylor
(London: Verso, 1977) 3 1.
29. Lukics, “Realism in the Balance” 3 I .
194 DURST
30. Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” Aesthetics and Politics ed. Ronald Tay-
lor (London: Verso, 1977) 22; see also HT 246.
3 1. Emst Bloch, “Bemerkungen zur Erbschaji dieser Zeit,” Vom Hazard zur Katastro-
phe. Politische Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1934-1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972)
6043.
32. See here Rabinbach’s “Unclaimed Heritage” 5f.
33. Hans Giinther, “Erbschaji dieser Zeit,” Internationale Literatur, 3 (1936): 101.
34. Giinther, “Erbschaji dieser Zeit” 96f., 101.
35. Bloch, “Bemerkungen zur Erbschaji dieser Bit” 43f.
36. Anson Rabinbach speaks of Bloch’s double exile: “from a Germany with fascism
in power and from a Stalinism powerless to comprehend it” (Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Her-
itage” 5).
37. In his history of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Wiggerhaus remarks: “The Institute [for
Social Research] never published anything by Bloch, [and] did not allow any of his books
to be reviewed in the Journal [for Social Research]” (Rolf Wiggerhaus, Die Frankfurter
Schuie [Miinchen: Hanser Verlag, 19861 216).
38. For a discussion of Bloch’s relation to the Institute for Social Research in the late
1930s, see Wiggerhaus, Die Frankfurter Schule 2 16.
39. Herbert Marcuse, “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitaren Staatsauf-
fassung,” Kultur und Gesellschaji I (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1965) 32.
40. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 10f.
41. In Reactionary Modernism, Herf refers only in one short passage to Bloch’s more
differentiated view of fascism (Herf, Reactionary Modernism 230).

00168890209597867ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity by David Durst

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

00168890209597867ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity by David Durst

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20

Ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890209597867

Published online: 30 Mar 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 107

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Ernst Bloch’s Theory of

A t least since the pllb~icationof Postmodernism, 01; the Cultural Logic of

opment of Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity across the Weimar period;’ in doing

NONSIMULTANEITY AND THE UTOPIAN SURPLUS OF ART

of artistic creativity.6 Reflecting the increasing alienation of artists over against

Here, it is as if Bloch rejects all pretense to a scientific explanation of artistic ge-

Sociological or other such explanations of music or art in general would only

NONSIMULTANEITY IN GERMANY, O R THE BELAATEDNATION

but also in the will-to-power seething from Prussian Wirtschafsmilitarismus,or

hegemonic strivings of imperial Germany. On the contrary, without the growing

to Schiller’s classicist faith in the aesthetic simulacra of harmony and wholeness,

NONSIMULTANEII’Y IN PHILOSOPHY OR THE COMPLICATION

1930, was but a loose collection of expressionistic fragments modeled on Walter

stract possibility of humanity, without real, scientific comprehension of the ob-

own Kantian critique of Hegel in The Spirit of Utopia. It is as if in the chapter

pears as something akin to an “advocate of Being,” for it involves a “dialectical

THE THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY OR

On 15 February 1929, Bloch’s article “Many Chambers in the World-House”

cultural structures of feeling. Subjectively, a simultaneous contradiction appears

fashion. As Bloch’s colleague at the Frankfurter ZPitung Siegfried Kracauer once

Bloch’s formulation of his own programmatic conception of a more open, multi-

THE NONSIMULTANEITY OF FASCISM

IN DEFENSE OF THE AVANT-GARDE

pressionism and surrealism is by no means simply a symptom of the increasing-

dressing an overly Prussified Germany’s belligerent “militarism,” “unchristian

THE FATE OF A THEORY

book in a letter of 6 February 1935 to Alfred C ~ h nAnd . ~ in

American University in Bulgaria

an unexpected dknouement, it may be Lukscs-wrong as he might have been in the

7. Kurt Pinthus, “Zuvor,” Menschheitsdanimerung. Ein Dokument des Expressionis-

Potrebbero piacerti anche